Use Google Reader To Make Life Easier

Use Google Reader to make life easier

If you’re like me, you have over a million (exaggeration) RSS feeds that you read on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone too. One of the issues that the people who invented RSS didn’t think about was syncing. But this is where Google steps in.

An RSS reader is a basic, stripped down version of a website that provides the latest news. Here are some basic feeds to add to Reader when you first start: Today’s iPhone, Google News, Apple Hot News, and Gizmodo.

If another site has an RSS feed look in the address bar of your in desktop Safari, IE, or Firefox and all the way to the right you should see a little RSS button, which will then take you to the feed. The address in the address bar is the one you will use when adding feeds to Google Reader.

The default RSS reader built into web browsers and local Mail programs basically sends “push notifications” to the browser bookmarks or into user’s inboxes. Personally, I like to read all of my news feeds everywhere so in this TiP, I’m going to show you how to keep everything in sync using Google Reader.

So, the first thing you’re definitely going to need is a Google account (Free, Google) which is not difficult at all. This can be via Google Apps or via the Google.com we all know and love. So, the next thing you have to do is go to reader.google.com. It’ll bring you into a view similar to Gmail, if you’re familiar with it, if not, don’t worry it’s kind of easy to get used to.

All you have to do is click “Add a Subscription” and paste the Feed links from any RSS ready website (see examples in the second paragraph). These will automatically be added to your “All Items” area.

Finally, being able to read them on all your devices is key to using Google Reader. Reader is basically just an in-between, syncing all of it to your other devices-the cloud. So, you can always use the mobile version of the site, or you could use apps from the App Store such as Reeder, Flipboard, and Byline. Most of them offer clunky user interfaces for a price, so if I where you, go ahead and just use the mobile version of the site.

There is no limit to the amount of feeds in Google Reader, so read away.

Ok, this is for the Apple geeks who stuck around until the end, if you’d like to dig into the settings a bit more (over by where your email address is) and click on Import/Export, I’ll gladly share my Apple feed with you. Just click here to download the file to upload in the settings of Google Reader.

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